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U.S. could face a showdown with al-Sadr

By ROBERT H. REID, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 18 minutes ago

Putting more U.S. soldiers in the streets of Baghdad risks a new showdown with a radical anti-American cleric who has modeled his movement after Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas.

Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army has re-emerged as a key force in the majority Shiite community after suffering substantial losses during two uprisings against the U.S. military in 2004. Sunni Arabs believe the militia is responsible for kidnapping and killing thousands of Sunnis since the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine.

Al-Sadr's black-clad followers insist they simply protect Shiite communities that have suffered horrific losses at the hands of Sunni insurgents and religious extremists such as al-Qaida in Iraq since the collapse of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime in 2003.

Whatever the truth, there is no way to restore order in Baghdad without dealing with al-Sadr and his followers — believed to be the largest and most active Shiite militia in Iraq.

U.S. officials believe disbanding Shiite and Sunni armed groups is essential to curbing the sectarian violence threatening the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and U.S. plans for removing substantial numbers of troops before U.S. congressional elections in November.

"If you don't do this, you end up with a situation like you have in Lebanon, where the militia becomes a state within a state," the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, Gen. John Abizaid, said in an interview this week with National Public Radio.

"It makes the state impotent to be able to deal with security challenges," he said.

Coalition forces already have begun moving against the Mahdi Army. In the last month, British troops have arrested the Mahdi commander in the southern city of Basra. And American soldiers killed 15 militiamen in a gunfight 40 miles south of the capital last weekend.

U.S. and Iraqi forces have staged at least two major raids this month in Sadr City, the Mahdi Army's Baghdad stronghold.

But American military officials have been careful to avoid identifying al-Sadr and his forces by name. Instead, spokesmen describe engagements with "thugs and criminals."

Their reluctance reflects al-Sadr's stature in Shiite politics, which he has achieved despite strong resistance from other Shiite groups as well as the Americans.

Apart from an estimated 10,000 militiamen, al-Sadr's movement controls 30 of the 275 seats in parliament and holds five Cabinet posts, including health, transportation and agriculture. Al-Sadr's followers are part of the Shiite coalition which includes al-Maliki's Dawa party.

Like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the al-Sadr movement runs social services ranging from caring for widows and orphans to burying unclaimed bodies in Baghdad and other cities.

The parallels with Hezbollah reflect the network of clerical-led Shiite groups throughout the Middle East, which have been gaining strength due to the rise of both Iran and the Shiite community in Iraq.

Al-Maliki's opposition to Israel's attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon is a sign of the network's influence in a changing Middle East.

The nexus of that network is the Shiite holy city of Najaf, the traditional educational and cultural center of Shiite Islam. Both Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, and Lebanon's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, studied in Najaf.

Fadlallah's teacher and mentor was Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, father-in-law of Muqtada al-Sadr and a founder of the Dawa party.

The younger al-Sadr has used ties to the Shiite power elite to outmaneuver the Americans over the last three years. The U.S. sought early on in the occupation to sideline al-Sadr, fearing his anti-American views.

U.S. officials believed al-Sadr was behind the April 10, 2003, assassination of cleric Majid al-Khoie, who was slain after returning to Najaf in hopes of winning support for the Americans from Shiite clergy.

A warrant was issued for al-Sadr in the al-Khoie slaying, but he was never arrested. Instead, the warrant was quietly shelved as part of the cease-fire deals the Americans accepted under pressure from Shiite clerics and politicians.

They feared a public backlash if foreign occupiers dealt harshly with the scion of one of the Shiites' most prestigious families.

___

Robert H. Reid is correspondent-at-large for The Associated Press and has reported frequently from Iraq since 2003.


Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060726/...E0BHNlYwN0bWE-

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To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

smilingassassin

I hope they do take out Sadr, one less hate mongering cleric.

highsea

Mookie Sadr is trouble. His strings are being pulled by Tehran. We should have taken him down when we had him and his gang cornered in Najaf.

News the other day said he was sending 3,000 men to Lebanon.

__________________
My baby called me up. She said- Why don't you ever take me out? Pick me up in your brand new car....You shake the short change from the old fruit jar...

Dreadnought

We should also declare that any radical religious leader that preaches and perpetuates what he does will not be safe either irregardless of what "religion" he "supposedly" represents.

Bluesman

You could be the Command briefer here at CENTCOM, mate, because that's absolutely true, everything you said.

Biggest mistake of this war was not taking him up on his offer to have us kill him when he begged us to, TWICE.


WAAAAAY back there I advocated we do just that, and predicted we'd be sorry if we didn't. Well, we didn't, and we are.

__________________
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell

smilingassassin

I second that initial assessment. When a rat rears its head you wack it. Sadr should have been killed, he already showed that he was against the U.S. in all forms.

Bluesman

And every time he opens his mouth, I hear a Persian accent. He's a bought-and-paid-for stooge of Iran. Iraqis wouldn't miss him all that much (even the Shiites - just ask Sistani), and we could've blacked Iran's eye on the cheap back then.

But now...it will be a lot more painful.

Dammit, we screwed that up, and that's not hindsight - I knew it back then.

Anon

Agreed, and seconded.

spittle8

I know that we can't, or the president can't, order assasinations on political leaders. Still. Could we find a way to classify this fellow as an 'enemy combatant'? If so, could our military legally assasinate him, without admitting it? It seems that we should be fighting every bit as dirty as they are

Wraith601

All Bush has to do is issue an Executive Order countermanding the existing that prohibits that and it's perfectly legal again.

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"We always have been, we are, and I hope that we always shall be, detested in France."
-Sir Arthur Wellesley

spittle8

Yes, but that is something he'd have to publicly do, yes? The political fallout. It seems retarded that we can't assasinate people. Being that a Republic is, by nature, totally selfish, and seeing as we are engaged in a major struggle, political, militaristic, and economic, should we not be going to greater lengths to ensure our interests? Seeing as how our biggests threats are often individuals..